Redes e Capacidade de Ação na Sociedade Civil. O caso de São Paulo - Brasil

Abstract

Despite the notable political and analytical popularity of the concept of “civil society” in recent years, we know surprisingly little about the modus operandi of real civil organizations, even those that have been highlighted constantly in the literature because of their unprecedented leading role. Against this backdrop and using network analysis which was applied to the result of a survey of 202 civil organizations in the city of São Paulo, this article identifies the main leading actors within civil society and above all their different logics of performance and the dynamics of interaction amongst them. Our findings showed, as one would expect from the literature, that the NGOs comprise the group of actors with the greatest capacity for action within the network; however, little or no attention has been paid to the coordinating bodies which the research reveals as a recent innovation in the creation of collective actors—an innovation which has been notably successful. Moreover, the social movements emerged as the most central actors in the network, despite the supposed loss of their leading role as has been diagnosed and taken for granted in the literature since the 1990’s. The three types of actors accumulate different structural advantages within the universe of civil organizations; they fulfill different roles and differ in importance to civil organizations that are peripheral or of intermediate centrality in the network.

Keywords

• networks
• civil society
• NGOs
• coordinating bodies
• social movements